Transmissions from Marfa… An Anecdotal Exploration of The Vital Legacy of Donald Judd, an American Artist
A Long Road East from LA… Flagstaff… Santa Fe to Twangtown… A Long Road West from Twangtown… Artsy Texas & Ranch Gates… The Hero & his Dream… A Desert Flower in the Shadow of the Boot… Oil, Borders, Baptists, La Entrada, Blood Meridian & Prayers for Rain… Journeyman Dream with Stars, Bars & Cars… Art as a Magnet… Tribal Blueprints for Small Art Communities & Collectives… The Blessed Yoga of American Samsara & International Art… Auctions, Bumper Stickers & Texas Lore… My Kingdom for a Phone, or “Heart of Darkness Versus Sprint”… Movie Stars, Beans & Small-town Service… Any Camera Will Do… An Invitation to Drop In, Tune Out & Get Disconnected… In the Ruins of Judd’s Castle – How Could It Be Otherwise? Stupid Archaeologists with Agendas Get It All Wrong… The Drive Out of Living Nowhere…
…..Is that despotism
or absolute power…unlimited sovereignty,
is the same in a majority of a popular assembly,
an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto,
and a single emperor, equally arbitrary, bloody,
and in every respect diabolical. Wherever it has resided
has never failed to destroy all records, memorials,
all histories which it did not like, and to corrupt
those it was cunning enough to preserve…..
–Ezra Pound, “Canto XXXIII”
He looked up. Blood, he said. This country is give much blood. This Mexico. This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing.
…
I pray to God for this country. I say that to you. I pray. I dont go in the church. What I need to talk to them dolls there? I talk here.
He pointed to his chest. When he turned to the Americans his voice softened again. You are fine caballeros, he said. You kill the barbaros. They cannot hide from you. But there is another caballero and I think that no man hides from him. I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don’t wake up forever.
–Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
“What is that horrible smell in the office, Tex? It’s making me sick.”
–Hunter Thompson, “Ugly, Tasteless, Terrifying and Wild… Count Me In!”
To believe with flesh,
with brain and heart,
that one thing was complete,
beautiful, accessible.
–Sorley MacLean, translated from “Coilltean Ratharsair”
Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and the context were meant to be.
–Donald Judd
Preface
I discovered the Chinati and Judd Foundations a handful of years past, while scanning the web for artist residencies. Marfa, Texas was the deal-killer that time: sixty miles north of the Mexican border, one of the hottest regions on the continent, and about equidistant from America’s coastal art centers. “Distant” being the operative. Aside from practical or professional considerations, I had an aesthetic aversion to Marfa’s main draw. Back then I despised Don Judd’s work in particular, and the work of the minimalists in general.
I thought of the minimalists, when I did, as little more than art technicians, mechanics and fabricators. I regarded their collective contributions to contemporary art as a relentless march of big boring boxes, monochromatic panels, piles of like things, enlivened only by a spot of industrial color here and there, always situated in a manner of dominance within the dreary walled vacancy of a white cube. In my estimation, the minimalists represented the dehumanization of the artistic enterprise. Arm-in-arm with the Pop/Op crowd, they had managed to take contemporary art on a long, oblique step backwards, after the palpably heroic Ab-Exers long-jumped to the pinnacle of the art world. They were enemies of artistry, I thought, haters of gesture, romance, heroism, metaphysics, and primitive dreaming.
My perspective on the works of Judd & gang was the perspective of a social realist working as an individual in collectives, an adherent of the Uncertainty Principle, a practitioner of 4D art using new and traditional media, with an action painter foundation. Sure, there was a lot of art stuff to like out there, much more to loathe, and I spent a lot of time, cornea, tonsils and shoe soles scouring books, galleries, museums and the brains of other artists in a massive effort to uncover the Great among the good and loathsome. It was my lack of due investigative diligence that precluded me from recognizing the importance of Donald Judd’s work, speaking holistically, as a precursor for my own. I found that out in Marfa.
After the fact, I’m being forced to admit that I missed much more than Judd, some time back. I gave up on his whole generation, I can’t remember when. Probably when I bought my first computer. That’s no excuse, and my neglect will have to be remedied. This starts when one admits he’s done something wrong.
…
As is often the case with prejudice and ignorance, reality and honest appraisals failed to support my superficial repulsion from the massive contributions to international art made by Donald Judd and his contemporaries. The thaw of my icy impression of Judd’s ouvre was incremental, proceeding at a glacial pace spanning a couple of decades. The melt of my aversion started with a stint at Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe, where I learned to appreciate fine art presentation as an extension of artistic vision. Master gilder Marty Horowitz imbued in us a profound respect for materials in service to the intention of the artist, as manifested in the art object. Ultimately, this admiration of the intrinsic value of metals, juxtaposition, spatial relationships, color and appropriate use (or abandonment) of convention motivated me to reevaluate Donald Judd’s work with specific objects.
A further softening of my brittle stance against the minimalists was precipitated at the hand (and mind) of another New York City artist gone feral in the Southwest, also like Judd, perhaps more beloved and better understood, at least initially, by Europeans than by his compatriots. I’m speaking of Richard Tuttle. During my employ at Goldleaf, we assisted Richard in his preparations for the Venice Biennale and a retrospective at the New Mexico Fine Arts Museum. At first glance, mad scientist (he was frequently pulling his fingers and muttering “North/South”) Tuttle’s methods and style might appear hopelessly divergent from Judd’s, for comparative purposes. This would only be true in a cursory summation of the two artists’ expressive choices and visible results. Let’s dig deeper.
Richard’s approach might be characterized as a steady pursuit of aesthetic, expressive and formal answers for big metaphysical and human(e) questions, posed by the artist to the artist, the art world and humanity – and maybe even to Something Beyond All That. Call it Elevated or Emphatic Conscientiousness. Possibly, there is in Tuttle’s work a relation to the study of dreams, akin but fundamentally a rejection of the psychological methodology of exploring the dreams of Man. Tuttle’s art is closer to poetics or even enlightened humanism, than it is to head-shrinking analysis. He possesses a devotion to orderly function and evolution not bred of fear – of failure, inadequacy, criticism, or authoritarian reprisal - but of freedom from those things. Richard’s greatest asset, it seems to me, is his humility. For though he presents answers to those big questions in his art, his answers are his own in the present tense, not singular answers to end all questioning. Judd’s workingman’s persistence in exhausting permutations in assembling 3D configurations of materials, combined with a strident ethic for maintaining aesthetic intensity, qualities Tuttle and Judd share, indicate how the two can be said to relate, and why their work evidences the longevity it does. Their distinguishing characteristics are simply a derivation of the circumstances of each artist’s own, singular humanity.
That said, having witnessed firsthand the dogged persistence Mister Tuttle applies in his pursuit of the Final Right Decision for any given artwork’s finishing, I can share with assurance that his answers result not from apparent whimsies, but from hidden, hard-won certainty. In Marfa I eventually recognized this same open-ended (with terminal stops), free and rigorous quality in the practice, and resulting artworks, of Donald Judd, with the aid of commentaries by the artist’s friends and advocates, such as Rudi Fuchs [see “Donald Judd (Artist at Work)”, Donald Judd, 2004]. Most clearly, though, Judd’s rigor is on display in his installations, both major and minor, and in the progression they demarcate throughout his several decades of production, both in and out of public scrutiny (at the time the works were made).
Also helpful were Judd’s own prodigious writings. As this document most surely demonstrates, an artist posing as an art critic is not what he seems (Beware his words, O artsy, for they are couched in a buzzsaw of selfish deliberation, whether or not they are facile, or legit). His critiques and commentaries are not, however, diminished in importance by his dualism. This is because the democratic virtue of transparency of process is what’s on display, when a practitioner reveals publicly his regard for his peers and their accomplishments. Affiliations are unmasked, the very creative mind is put in relief, and the results, as contained in the artist/critic’s own work are set forth to be judged (again, and significantly, publicly), so that the viewer/reader may determine to his own satisfaction the Truths, ideas, skills and execution of the artist/critic. One has to be nuts to attempt this tightrope act, because he can fall on either side, either as an artist or critic, or worse, he can fail at both, and be sheared through the middle. So, Judd’s greatest asset is not humility, but maybe dumb courage. I think he was a real Scot, possibly a Berserker. Richard was probably more pleasant to be around.
The third factor of the thaw involved my handling and helping to install a couple of Donald Judd’s artworks, during a stint at LA Packing Crating & Transport in 2005. I was part of a four- or six-man crew that assembled and presented a vertical arrangement of plexi and metal boxes in a Beverly Hills gallery of note last year. A client of the gallery was interested in buying it. I also helped prepare for transport and load one of the thin horizontal brushed aluminum with color wall pieces that had just been restored by a conservator. Both experiences were inordinately stressful. The first, because of the unforgiving precision required to correctly hang the boxes to achieve the artist’s desired effect. Rick, LA Packing’s resident genius installation/preparation Mr. Prickly, accomplished this with the assistance of very qualified art handlers and myself. The second, because of the fantastically fragile attributes of the materials Judd chose to manifest his vision. A wayward grip, and a fingerprint ruins the piece. Fortunately, my lead on the task, Ralph, knew what to do and how to do it, and wasn’t at all handicapped by a diabolical, if successfully resisted, curiosity to know what it feels like to mar perfection expressively. Fortunately, my lead was not an artist, and had to my knowledge no desire to be one (O artsy, also beware the artist/art handler: he is torn between love and devotion. For a dose of what Judd thought of art handlers, see “Complaints: part II”, Arts Magazine, March 1973. Here’s a taste: “The various shippers are careless…No one ever knows how the damage happened. Nothing is ever art to any of the truckmen. My work is just metal; Flavin’s is just fixtures; Chamberlain’s just junk; and so on.” Ouch.)
These tactile encounters with the art of Donald Judd revealed two important threads in his modus operandi. The first might be described as a fanatical adherence to correctness in presentation and design. This is not just a spatial or aesthetic concern, much less some function of eye-roll-inducing and undeserved self-importance on the artist’s part. The muttered accusations of nobodies who describe Judd as a megalomaniac are wildly wrong. This fanaticism is the linchpin of Donald Judd’s interrelations with philosophy, art, artwork and viewer. It is fundamental to the artist’s belief that his job description entailed the establishment of the optimum holistic environment in which to present the optimum experiential reality of the specific object. If one doesn’t grok this aspect of Judd’s stance, one cannot begin to understand Marfa, much less that which distinguishes Judd’s art housed there from the multitudinous and variegated offerings of his European and American contemporaries, both accomplished and rightly forgotten. It seems to me that Judd’s decision to offer other artists an exhibit and production arena in Marfa has more to do with presenting a right environment for the experience of Art as time-relative Truth than any sentimental or ego-based anti-rationale. Certainly, Judd’s own well-documented animus and protestations against the iniquities of the temporary exhibit system would reinforce this position.
The second thread might be described as a consciousness of the inherent fragility of Art, to which Judd responded by encouraging and advocating for art that demands care from its caretakers. There’s not much else to say about this, except that he was right to do so.
As a student of Art’s value to civilization (…”it seems that his particular interest was the role of the artist in highly developed cultures.” – Thomas Kellein: The Whole Space. The Early Works of Donald Judd), Judd recognized and acknowledged the greatest functions of the human-made thing. One of those functions is social. The human-made thing asks, “What does freedom, especially freedom of expression, look like?” This it asks of itself, the artist, and the rest equally. However, the made-thing asks us, the makers of things, “Once expressed, how do we treat the embodiment of freedom?”
These questions, I believe are directional. In Donald Judd’s case, they point first to his recognition of his own responsibilities as an artist. He met those responsibilities more than adequately. Then, they point to his tireless pursuit of new and better vehicles for the reinvention, resuscitation and revelation of freedom in its many aspects, all valuable. Not least among these vehicles for freedom is architecture, as anyone knows who has stood outside in midday June in Marfa. Freedom of speech is nicer, when one’s brain is not boiling in one’s skull. But there’s more than that to be understood at the Chinati/Judd Foundations. Judd transformed a fort and prison into a place to celebrate artistic values and expression. Is this not wonderful? In my opinion, it is practical conscientiousness at its best. In Marfa, through modification Judd redefined architectural artifacts of war and the industry and consequences of war, and ended up with inventive, clean and simple structures designed for the purposes of good living. This is not architecture for its own sake. These structures protect and project Judd’s informed materialized notions of dynamic Freedom and Truth, which we Judd pilgrims co-define as Fine Big “A” Art. Or at least one would like to think “we” get it.
These Judd houses are not the stuff of flag waving or flag burning sentiment, nor are they monuments or temples to art or anything else. They’re primarily real. I beheld it, ambled through it, signed the release and took pictures of it – along with the other civilians on my tours. It’s almost free ($10) and open to the public (by reservation or appointment)! Maybe I should come back to this later, my enthusiasm is getting the best of me. I’m almost giddy, bordering on glib. I don’t want do anything to diminish the gravitas of Judd’s endeavor. For my money, there are few higher callings. Real.
Finally, the erosion of my resistance to Judd was precipitated by developments in my own artistic approach. Over the past decade I began to produce large-scale installations for museum and galleries, doing a show every six weeks to three months. As my practice evolved from a studio painter’s to a multimedia multidisciplinary guy’s, more of the production process involved delegating fabrication and output work to printing, video, audio, graphic design and presentation pros. Sometimes, the choice to bring in a pro to help produce pieces was born out of deadline considerations. More often, the choice involved recognition on my part that these pros were as proficient at their tasks as I was at mine, and our collaboration resulted in a finished piece that was better as a sum of parts. This realization was both liberating and humbling, a rebooting of the myth of the signature artist of the 20th century to incorporate earlier European paradigms, yielding a fruitful form that appropriated the best qualities of both creative systems. This aesthetic was congealed in my noggin in some new way under the sky-bowl above Marfa.
To sum up: In the same way a hole in the fuselage of a jet airliner at 30000 feet will turn the plane inside out and crash it, Marfa crumpled and flamed my old view of the minimalists (an inept term, and one Judd apparently never liked) for good when I visited there in June 2006. In one of those profound awakenings that reconfigures one’s entire conceptual apparatus, a brief four-day visit to the Chinati and Judd Foundations - and to that photogenic town of 2500 or so souls in which much of Judd-world is embedded - has branded in my mentation a grand new standard of what’s possible for an American artist to achieve.
…
Unexpectedly, I also discovered a compelling convergence of historical threads in Marfa, which I will discuss below. Oil, Cowboys, Movies, the Border, Missionaries, the Fringe of America’s dark Dream: all moored in a land whose prehistory is so palpable that the current inhabitants must gird themselves with their own lore just to approximate significance and consequence in a rational equilibrium with the land and its power. It is a perfect place for a curmudgeon of an artist who loves bagpipes to carve his castle out of the stony face of Time. It is no less a perfect place for such a man to lay his body into the Earth, when his work is finished, or at least ripened.
…
It’s a marvelous thing to drift into a rich and fertile creative seam, to mine it and find a story like Judd’s running through it. Over the years, I’ve had the great good fortune to encounter a fair number of heroes who have inspired and spurred my artistic evolution. One develops a sense for it. My first encounter with Sorley MacLean, for instance, occurred a few months before he passed away. I was on holiday, traveling through the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and on that day my mission was to find a web portal on the Isle of Skye. The proprietor of the one I located was Sorley’s next door neighbor, a Campbell. When Mr. Campbell heard my name, he asked if I knew of the 20th Century’s greatest Gallic poet, who shared my name, and would I like to meet him. While I typed who-knows-what to who-knows-whom, Mr. Campbell walked next door, knocked on the door, and spoke, I think with Mr. MacLean’s wife. Sorley’s health didn’t permit an audience, but as a result of the near miss, I purchased a collection of the poet’s work. That book (From Wood to Ridge) is one of the most important I’ve ever read. A month or two later, I drove a show from Edinburgh to Skye in a gale, and when I learned that I’d missed Sorley MacLean’s last reading by a day, I wept. Donald Judd’s Complete Writings is equally arresting.
Often an active artist’s cultural detection is aided and abetted by sympathetic agents – other artists, media, a stranger – but the mysterious nature of willful discovery is in itself evidence of a certain kind of freedom. I like the notion that it’s an inherently American phenomenon in my case, similar to a roadman’s catalog of good diners. What’s on the menu is as important as who’s in the kitchen: starting with comics and pulp novels, and moving along through the poets, painters, songsmiths, architects, soldiers and neighbors, too numerous to list. If one’s art is gumbo, this is what constitutes the ingredients. Some artists are methodical about it: Judd’s kitchen was New York in the early 60’s, and he browsed through the whole market until he found the finest parts and peers, and Thank God, gave us a running commentary on the main course. Time has proved Judd’s analysis preponderantly correct. More important is how he applied the fruits of his research. My gumbo metaphor was a big stretch for the above paragraph, so I apologize, though I don’t believe I should change it. Food and art are equally valuable, for sustaining different parts of the human enterprise. Sometimes the comparison is clunky, but that doesn’t alter the rightness of it. Just look at Donald Judd’s kitchen.
…
I hope, dear reader, that you do not misinterpret my infatuation with Mr. Judd for an odd sort of artistic necrophilia. Now, it may seem as though I’m either waking up in a long-term relationship with Donald Judd and his amazing unfolding story, or engaged in a nascent relationship with him, not unlike the sort of romance that bursts into bloom in stages: starting with loathing; continuing as grudging admiration; swelling to curiosity, and even some sincere, if compartmentalized, respect; and finally blossoming into a passionate involvement.
…
Why Judd, why Marfa and why Now? At the core of my newfound appreciation for Mr. Judd is not some tissuey, faux reverential envy of a guy whose tale is couched in the art world Big Time, although Donald Judd is that, and never apologetically so. This is no engagement in post-mortem culturati climbing. No, my current involvement with Judd is a next step in a decades-long investigation into the 4th Dimensional Art of Today. To reduce it to a cryptic shorthand notation that potentially too vague to be comprehensible without further illustration, I am most interested in the alchemy that transmutes a human, through the manifestation and manufacture of a singular, specific object into an open container for place, space, story, meaning, moment and work; awareness as form; a multi-faceted viewfinder that tells the Truth about itself and everything else, activated by all senses, but certainly touch and sight; and movement. This is what I hope to reveal through a study of a celebrated aesthetic ancestor, his forms, his methods and, with informed conjecture, his dreams.
…
Is Judd Marfa? Or is Marfa, with its treasures, a unique illustration of whence such abstractions as my pale language flee when confronted by a more potent visceral reality, a maker of Judds. If Now is a reality, then is the Marfa in which Don Judd is embedded, possibly forever, one of B-ing: beans, beer, blisters, bugs, beef, and so on? Or is Marfa the Texas town of Giant, or Snakes on a Plane or No Country for Old Men? Was that Daniel Day Lewis (I loved In the Name of the Father and would have loved to tell him so) I saw having breakfast at the Brown Recluse? When will someone make a movie about Donald Judd, and will it be filmed in Marfa, Hollywood or New York, and who will be its star? & How can 100 metal boxes, contained within a larger box, compete with a Moving Image? And how can a coffee shop’s name compete with my memory of a Nashville studio, so infested with those little arachnids, that each visit yielded one or more painful bites for a year and a half? What’s the connection?
…
My enthusiasm over Marfa is, I think, at its heart rooted in a process of deepening appreciation for the magic and value apparent in the trajectory (geographic and internal) of the Moving Artist; that is, the social construct assigned the title “artist”, animated by an arguably AI, supplanted by an unknowable, incommunicable spiritual directive. The principal subject here, obviously, is Donald Judd. The focus of the exploration centers on his work. Context is provided by history, chronicles that document the man, the work, and, in his own words, his creative criteria. Secondarily, there is interest in his relationships with others, familial or professional, flawed or not. At length, an examination of effects arising from his formal choices, driven by internal forces, is necessary to understand the myriad personal, aesthetic and cultural dependencies pursuant to this American artist’s production. What clues do we have, viz a viz the Spirit of Donald Judd, and if we knew, really, what motivated that Spirit, would it improve the work we see on display at the Chinati and Judd Foundations (and in galleries all over the world), or would we be disappointed by the Truth as revealed through the made thing?
Or is the ghost of Donald Judd, as described in my fantasy about his talks and dinners, a common property, now. Certainly, the Foundations he established own a proprietary stake in formulating the lore surrounding the entity. The after-market, as demonstrated in the Foundations’ recent auctions, has other criteria. Collectors, curators, historians and tourists all have their own agendas and takes.
…
For me, Mr. Judd’s Tale, Spectacle & Lore reaffirm a seminal notion. When the Artist cleaves to a singular vision, and that vision is free and “valuative”, as Don Judd put it, and formed in circumstances where freedom and value are commonly put upon or abjured, the Spectacle is always worthy of attention and attendance. For all the theoretical and political invective hurled at the Author, the Dead White Male Artist, the Signature Style, a/k/a Megalomania, and so on, Art is the better for the phenomenon of the Artist’s Tale, most certainly when the Lead Artist is one whose ambition is most true to his gifts. It is the awesome force of unrelenting generosity, even beyond demise that generates the Lore. Donald Judd is demonstrably an Important Artist. His name & work generate many hits on Google. He and some others built a bridge to Now from the beachhead that was the New York School. To neglect him is to surrender Marfa to La Entrada. We would be fools to do it.
The only thing that can justify all of this trouble is the thing that did: objects have essences. The world has a spiritual order and identity, part and whole.
–Donald Judd, March 1963
The world is watching. It stands in for the dead man. Who by his audacity has pressed it into his service. For the world does have a conscience, however men dispute it. And while that conscience may be thought of as the sum of consciences of men there is another view, which is that it may stand alone and each man’s share be but some small imperfect part of it. The man who died favored this view. As I do myself. Men may believe the world to be – what is the word? Voluble.
Fickle.
Fickle? I don’t know. Voluble then. But the world is not voluble. The world is always the same…
–Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
“Down here the lilacs die”…
–Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain
Introduction
(Or Why Texas Is on my Mind, Part Deux)
“While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages, and wrote poems with all our might.”
–Jean Arp, as quoted by Harold Rosenberg in The De-Definition of Art
Of course, finally, I only believe my own work.
–Donald Judd, 1965
Yes. This traveler also has a life and there is a direction to that life and if he himself did not appear in this dream the dream would be quite otherwise and there could be no talk of him at all. You may say that he has no substance and therefore no history but my view is that whatever he may be or of whatever made he cannot exist without a history. And the ground of that history is not different from yours or mine for it is the predicate life of men that assures us of our own reality and that of all about us. Our privileged view into this one night of this man’s history presses upon us the realization that all knowledge is a borrowing and every fact a debt. For each event is revealed to us only at the surrender of every alternate course. For us, the whole of the traveler’s life converges at this place and this hour, whatever we may know of that life or out of whatever stuff it may be made. De acuerdo?
–Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
“Time and the availability of time,” she said, “has an awful lot to do with an explosion of expression.”
Brooke Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum, speaking about the art of Donny Johnson, incarcerated murderer; from “In Prison for Life, He Turns M&M’s Into an Art Form,” New York Times, July 21, 2006
Begash. I’m Tommy Robbins and I’ll be filling in for Big Man for the duration of this introduction. Paul telephoned me yesterday & left some gobbedly on the machine about being in the studio too long. Said he was headed up to the Sierras & Death Valley & maybe Eureka. Asked if I could finish this up for the magazine. No pressure, says he. No problem, says he. John’s off to Italy & Debra’s cool with it & he thought he’d mentioned it when he talked to her before he left. Woke up the next AM & the bloody Scotsman’d taped a fat brown envelope to my front door & a note taped to it that read, “All you need is inside this envelope. Inside were scribbled notes & photocopies & a couple of CDs of pictures & a cassette of voice memos & twenty bucks. What the fuck, I says to myself.
I telephoned his home number & it was disconnected. I telephoned his cell. I always record my phone conversations, in case the NSA tries to frame me. Big Man knows this & at one point suggested we just use the recording for the article. I said, “Cool idea!” So that’s what a lot of this is going to be, you know, like, excerpts from our phone calls & also the shit that was in that envelope. I’m going to leave out the first part of our conversation, because it’s full of filthy language. I was pissed, because I had been writing a freelance piece for Juxtapoz about this tag project that came to me in a dream the night France won the World Cup. I’m going to write it, no matter what Paul, says about it. I bet they’ll print it, too, because it’s very bad ass.
Part 2
TM: Where’d you come up with this Marfa idea, anyway? It’s kind of so not Now. I mean, I talked to you the day before you left. You were staying a night in Flagstaff. You were going to stop by that Beaver Street Gallery. You were going to call that massage babe & go to yoga… Which reminds me that you are such a big Cali art boy pussy nowadays, ya know? Mister “I need a backrub & some down dog…
PM: I didn’t get that, Tommy. What was that?
TM: Then you were going to meet your boy Will in Santa Fe for Father’s Day & have dinner & hang time. Didn’t Goldleaf have an opening for John Massee sometime that weekend? I love his new shit. He’s doing a mad scientist lately, making little junk DVD players to run saturated jittery still life vids on, & weird architecture hooch dioramas & writing manifestos & building little solar systems with rocks, plus the usual robot guys on mammoth pedestals. Where’d you & Will eat? Maria’s? I bet you ordered the Burrito Grande with Christmas, side of fries & extra sopaipillas. Am I right?
PM: You’re breaking up. Can you hear me? Anyway, I know it’s nuts, this Judd fixation. Of all places, Marfa! Why did he build it there? The guy’s from the Midwest, for God’s sake! Like you say, the point of the trip was to attend this wedding in Austin, or so I thought when I drove out of Claremont. That cantankerous wheezer John Mulvany was hitching his sweetheart Monique in mid-June, and the lovely couple invited me to attend the ceremony. Now, I’m not usually big on nuptials, as you know, but something’s got into me, and I’ve set a record, a personal best as it were, by appearing at two in one summer.
TM: You bastard! You haven’t made it to one of mine! That last one in Vegas was insane, and you came up with some lame excuse, like Ecoli, or food poisoning, or some other lie! So what if she was a stripper! So what if she had, like, five kids! Only three of ‘em were hers. The rest I think were adopted, maybe one was her neighbor’s… So what? I loved her! The least you could’ve done was show up! You’re such a dick!
PM: Yes, TWO! …the other was an idyllic Santa Fe May wedding. Yes, artsy love has perfumed the air, and, fortunately, for the first time in two decades I’ve found myself blessed with that boon to creative adventure, the “summer break.” Graduate art school was out of session and the road called. Little did I know, when I turned East onto “the 10”, that I would be driving towards my aesthetic reformation.
Dropped call.
…
(From a voice memo.)
To get to Austin from LA, one can take a train, bus, plane or automobile. I suppose one could walk, run (like not-real Forrest Gump), hitchhike, ride a bike, motorcycle or a horse, rollerblade, or one could skateboard the 1200 or so miles. I chose motorized vehicle, hence my turning onto “the 10”. My instruments for half-crossing the North American continent included a Toyota, a gas card (Exxon/Mobile), clothing, and a few odds and ends, including cameras, gear for art making and samples for art showing. The itinerary was LA, Flagstaff, Santa Fe, Austin, and, maybe, Marfa. As for Marfa, I had phoned Chinati Foundation, leaving a message. One needs a reservation to see the collection there, so I tentatively asked if I could have one, still unsure whether I wanted to commit to the extra driving, lodging and food costs the trek to Marfa would entail. Nick Terry, Chinati’s Coordinator for Education and Public Affairs, returned my call promptly the next morning. I made the reservation and mentioned sheepishly that I had been interested in applying for a Chinati residency for probably four years, told him a little about what I do, and asked him whether he thought it was a good idea to toss my hat in the ring. He turned a bit mystic on me, offering a response something like “Come down here and see how it feels. You’ll figure out whether it’s a fit.” I couldn’t tell you exactly what Nick’s reply, word-for-word was. I wasn’t taking notes, because at that point writing an article about Marfa had never entered my mind. Something about that conversation, though, tweaked my Muse antennae.
…
TM: What the hell’s a “Muse antenna?”
PM: Good to hear your voice, Tommy! How’s the article coming?
TM: Stupid. What’s a frickin’ “Muse antenna?” Are you claiming you’ve got some sorta artsy ESPN? You really have lost it.
PM: I’m doing well, thanks. The White Mountains are incredible. We should come up here and do some camping. I’ll bring the weenies. Anyway, I really needed a break. That car culture series was really putting some strain on the old brain, not to mention the monoprint monochromes. The latter’s totally indebted to Donald Judd. He’s even inspired me to consider another attempt at building the output of “Fall”. Here in the great outdoors, it’s all becoming clear. I’m starting to understand why Judd chose Marfa. Great art needs a backdrop of mountains, space, the Big Sky. …Hey, the road’s going to dip up ahead, so I may lose you.
TM: I hope you’re not using that Exxon card. You should be boycotting those profiteering bastards. America is at war, because of that maniac in the White House, his dad & their cronies, and Exxon’s laughing all the way to the bank. Did you know Exxon’s a Texas company? Did you know Halliburton’s a Texas company? & They’re just the worst offenders! Go online & check out the top 100 Texas corporations at Forbes’ website, & tell me how many of those companies are bummed about the Mideast’s problems. Why don’t you write about that, instead of this ridiculous artsy fartsy skipping through the daisies to Marfa, & finding Don Judd, & “WWDJD!” What would Donald Judd do? He was adamantly against the Vietnam War! He was adamantly against the first Gulf War! Did you not even read that Chinati Foundation newsletter you left me? Jeezus, if that’s a newsletter, my Ford Focus is a Hummer! Anyhow, there’s a great piece in there that Judd wrote about the United States getting tangled up in that moral vacuum of quagmiring bloodlust again & what it does to us victims & artists & whatnot… Here, let me read this to you…
PM: …The smog was killing me. You can’t enjoy a smoke in LA. The air’s filthy!
Dropped call.
…
It’s hard to write about constructive and peaceful matters before a war. It’s difficult to live threatened by war all your life, and further to know that the reasons are not outwardly determined and serious, but are inwardly caused and frivolous.
War is failure. War is caused by carelessness, wastefulness, thoughtlessness, incompetence, complacency and laziness. That’s why war is the solution and dream of governmental bureaucrats, and as well the easiest way out for their subjects. If the Americans, governors and governed, ordinarily thought of war as failure, they would not be in Arabia. But even there, without being able to say why they are there, war is exciting and a little glorious and seems to be a brave defense. This war, which may carelessly grow to be World War III, will be very destructive in lives as in buildings, which are labor and effort, the construction of lives. But war is not just a mindless spasm that goes away. The preparation for war for all our lives has made our society. At length and steadily it destroys constructive and peaceful activities.
–Donald Judd, “Nie wieder Krieg,” excerpted from Chinati Foundation Newsletter, Volume 10
This essay was written in the days before the Gulf War began in January 1991. The title means “Never Again War.”
…
A hand-scrawled note in the margin next to Judd’s “Never Again War” essay: “My son Will was born auspiciously on the day the first Gulf War ended. He entered the world in a little adobe house in Pecos, New Mexico, with the help of two beautiful midwives. February 28, 1991. His mother had a back labor, for like 18 hrs. It was cold. We went through a cord of wood in 24 hrs. Will is the most precious person in my life. Six months after Will was born, I left his mother. Will ended that war, too. It just took a lot longer. Never again war. –PJM”
…
(From a laser printer printout. I spilled my coffee on it accidentally, so some of it’s messed up or splotchy and whatnot.)
For the inaugural issue of Cantanker Magazine, I submitted a short essay entitled “Why Texas Is on my Mind.” In that essay, I alluded to some reasons for my choosing to locate my studio in Southern California and attend graduate school here at CGU, rather than settling in Austin, where I had envisioned establishing a 4D Media Studio and School. After visiting Austin a half dozen times over the course of a year (2004), moving all my stuff from West Virginia (in a 24’ box truck), hanging a show, then returning to do a major production in the Fall of 2005, I considered myself adequately informed about the Austin visual art/cultural scene to know not to invest five years or more there as a working, exhibiting artist in residence.
That said, as I wrote in the first Cantanker article, I had found much to love in Austin and her people. Barbeque, Barton Springs, etc., St. Edward’s and the Shady Tree crew, and now the extended artsy family of Cantanker, as well as beloved relatives who live near the city, keep me involved and coming back.
(A paragraph or two’s smeared here. Sorry ‘bout that, but my cat loves to knock over my travel mug, whenever I get baked, chill out & nap on the couch. When I’m working on a story, I usually set the cup down on the coffee table, which is my work desk, like, and Bugger jumps up there, sniffs the cup, licks the lid, then tips it over. & Then that mouse-lovin’ worthless ball of fur runs and hides under my bed & mews. Every time.)
…
TR: I’m trying to get through all this junk you left me, but I’m not seeing the point. Isn’t Cantanker an Austin art magazine? Why should anybody in Austin give a damn about Marfa? Why go to Marfa, when you can stroll on down Brisket row, & check out the Blanton? Austin may not have Claes Oldenberg, but can Marfa brag about having the most beautiful women in the world? Didn’t some poll come out, claiming Austin’s females are the hottest? Was it Myspace? My short-term memory is shot. What would you know about it anyway? The whole time you were doin’ that show at St. Ed’s you were holdin’ out for that Sierra Club Cali-babe you were hooked with who went to Yale. You are such an idiot.
PM: Sorry, Tommy. I missed that last part. I think you were asking me why I’m juxtaposing Marfa and Austin. It’s a strategy to get at the factors that are necessary for an art scene to succeed. Marfa’s got all them now – permanent collections, thriving galleries and art foundations, artist residencies, but it had nothing in the way of contemporary art forty years ago. Don Judd, Dia, Chinati, Ayn and a bunch of others built one of America’s coolest art destinations in a quiet Texan town of 2500 souls just north of the Mexican border. It’s amazing! John Villani would love this story. By comparison, what does Austin have? Keep in mind that the population of Travis County is close to a million people. Well, Austin has UT. Did you know that the endowment for the University of Texas system is the richest of America’s state colleges? In 2004, I think that endowment came in at over nine billion dollars, which was 5th highest overall. So, Austin gets the mediocre Blanton. AMOA can’t even finance a new building downtown. Austin’s the capital of Texas, one of the most powerful republics on earth, and can you name one major piece of contemporary public art in that city? Aside from Julie Speed, a fine artist who admittedly sells well all over the country…
TR: Who’s Julie Speed?
PM: You need to get out of LA more.
TR: I read the magazines.
PM: Anyway, aside from Ms. Speed, name one artist who’s A-list.
TR: You’re such a snob.
PM: I am not! I’m just trying to make a point.
TR: I know, I know, but let me make one, here. Why is it that Exxon & Halliburton & Conoco & Dell & Sysco & AT&T & Valero & Marathon Oil & Plains All American Pipeline & Clear Channel & Apache & JC Penny & all the other Fortune 500 companies in Texas hate art & by extension, free speech, which is what art is. Art is at the pinnacle of the free speech food chain & these corporations hate it, unless it’s serving their bottom line.
PM: Did you say “Clear Channel?”
TR: Yep. Texan company, with some offices in Austin.
PM: They do talk radio. They do music.
TR: Clear Channel is Satan. They elected George Bush.
PM: Whatever. All those companies are based in Texas?
TR: That’s right. Texas boasts more Fortune 500 companies than any other state in the union, more than New York & more than Cali. …Believe it or not. & What’s the most profitable company of them all? That’s right: Exxon, by a long way; last year they cleared 36, 130 million dollars. Who knows what they’ll rake in this year, which is, like, year four of Iraq War II. You think Exxon, or any of these other guys ever does any business in Austin? I guess they never stop by AMOA on the way to the State house. I mean, it is only a few blocks down Congress. These guys must not be able to see the sign from the back seats of their limos. I mean, what do they care about Texan art anyway? When you’re that rich, why not fly to New York or LA for your hack impressionist landscapes. Plus, guys like Terry Allen aren’t that easy to control. It makes more sense to these new and old Robber Barons to starve the artists, than to try to handle them, or, worse case scenario, muzzle them.
PM: In 2004 Austin couldn’t come up with the five million bucks to pay for the honor of being the first American Capital of Culture. These guys are starving this city, just like they’re doing all over the country. It’s legalized thievery and usury, the worst era of wealth redistribution the US has ever seen. Art is a topical symptom. All you have to do is look at how a society treats its art and artists, and you’ll know how healthy the society is, especially in terms of free speech, without which a democracy cannot function. It’s a top-down problem. Have you heard about what the Smithsonian’s doing to try to stay alive? It’s despicable. Have you heard a peep out of the NEA? No more individual artist grants, no more complaints. This administration tried to destroy NPR, too. Thank God, they fouled that up with their overreaching. Under the former Texan governor in the White House, our nation’s most distinguished cultural institutions are being strangled, & so are our basic civil liberties. It’s no coincidence. Art is a social health/free speech indicator. Remember the Nazis’ “Decadent Art?” But in Marfa, you find magic.
TR: Well, don’t forget. UT won the national championship in football.
PM: I read recently at Aggiesport.com that in 2004, UT “topped the nation in football revenue at $53.2 million, clearing $38.7 million after expenses.” Are you surprised UT won it all? You think that’s where all those Texan Fortune 500’s are spending their disposable income? Gotta go. Kate’s calling.
TR: Hey, Big Mac, I thought you ought to know. A McLean won the Miss Scotland contest.
PM: Of course she did. Have you seen the pictures of her? What a beauty!
TR: No kidding. I didn’t realize they give that prize to Page 3 girls, but, if you want my opinion, I think it’s about time.
PM: Wrong Nicola McLean. When I get back to LA I’m going to beat you senseless for that one.
TR: C’mon! Lighten up! I was just joshin’ around!
PM: …
TR: Dammit.
…
From the Austin Chronicle, “Naked City”, 11/15/02:
The Live Music Capital will in 2004 become an official American Capital of Culture. Austin was so designated this week by a group allied with the Organization of American States and the European Union (which has selected its own “cultural capitals” for years; there, it’s a really big deal). Austin is the first U.S. city to be picked in the five years of the American initiative — it will share the honor in 2004 with Santiago, Chile.
…Fast forward to January 16, 2004, to a blurb published under the byline “At Least We’re Still the State Capital” (from Robert Faires’ column “Articulations” in the Chronicle):
This time last year, Austin’s then Mayor Gus Garcia signed an agreement proudly accepting the designation of our fair city as an American Capital of Culture for 2004. The idea was that for the whole of this year Austin would be showcasing itself as a hotbed of the arts with a string of ceremonies, marketing initiatives, and special events, just as cities in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Panama have done since the program was launched four years ago as an offshoot of a similar program in Europe. Now, here we are two weeks from what was to be the official ceremony kicking off Our Culture Year, and, well, current Mayor Will Wynn has said, “Thanks but no thanks” to the international honor. Seems the city couldn’t find the funds to support the designation — roughly $5 million to $10 million that would pay for a year’s worth of promotional activities and affiliated programs. While it’s hardly surprising that the city had trouble finding that kind of scratch, given the scramble for cash for the current budget — even with help from a committee of community leaders seeking private support — it’s a particular shame since Austin would have been the first city in the U.S. chosen by the Organization of the American Capital of Culture to hold this distinction. Ah well, some other year.
(Note found in between articles, scribbled on the back of a Thom Yorke “Eraser” sticker.)
I read the first article while gearing up to move to Austin. I read the second after I had already moved to Austin. Then this came up: an article, again, penned by Faires, published in the Chronicle (2/20/04, “Austin’s Cultural Makeover; Which arts facilities were built, which weren’t built, and why”). The following excerpt deals with the Austin Museum of Art, and Austin’s failures to upgrade the institution significantly over a twenty-year series of bust-boom cycles. I regarded these as bad signs, production-wise.
Austin Museum of Art – Downtown
Fourth at Guadalupe
Project proposed in: 1996
Architect: Richard Gluckman
Original cost: $60 million
Revised cost: $43 million, currently not established
Current status: on hold
The tech boom of the Nineties was supposed to give the Austin Museum of Art its second chance at building the great downtown museum it had tried and failed to build during the real estate boom of the Eighties. In 1985, voters approved $14.7 million in bond money for AMOA (then Laguna Gloria Art Museum) to build a permanent facility downtown. The museum had a site and a design by prominent architect Robert Venturi, but the late Eighties bust, combined with financial setbacks and staff changes within the institution, real estate troubles that led to AMOA losing the site, and cross-cultural art wars killed the museum’s chances of realizing its dream by decade’s end. But as Austin’s economy recovered, so did AMOA’s downtown dream. By the late Nineties, it had obtained a new site (one block south of the original), won back the favor of the city government, and opened galleries on Congress. It scrapped the Venturi plans and selected a new architect, Richard Gluckman of New York, to design a 125,000-square-foot facility on the original site (reacquired through a land swap with the city). When Gluckman’s design was unveiled in March 2000, AMOA anticipated a groundbreaking that fall and an opening day in 2003. The museum felt so confident about its fundraising that it gave the city back the remaining $13 million in 1985 bond money. But shortly after that the project began to unravel. Internal politics led to board resignations, staff layoffs, the departure of Executive Director Elizabeth Ferrer, and the decision by museum patrons Mort and Angela Topfer to withdraw their combined $6 million donation to the downtown building. Ferrer’s successor, Dana Friis-Hansen, worked to keep the project alive, but the downturn left him with few options. AMOA briefly considered reworking the Gluckman design to be built in phases, with the first phase costing around $43 million, but that created as many problems as it solved, and Friis-Hansen estimated the facility’s operating cost at $9 million a year – a far cry from the $2.8 million of AMOA’s annual budget today. Having spent all but $860,000 of the funds raised toward the building, AMOA chose the better part of valor: It abandoned the Gluckman plans and focused its energies on the much more affordable renovation of the Laguna Gloria site. Decisions about any new downtown facility are being left to the future.
…
TR: So what’s this crap about the con on the front page of the New York Times?
PM: My batteries dying, so let’s try to make this quick. Donny Johnson is a murderer in solitary who makes paintings on postcards with the dyes he collects from M&M candies. He’s the latest in a long line of art world dancing monkeys, who get press as human interest types or freaks or oddities. Remember the elephant that could paint?
TR: Yeah, I remember. What was the name of the girl wunderkind you wrote about in Nashville? Nechita?
PM: Exactly. Alexandra.
TR: Where is she now?
PM: She’s about to turn twenty-one. I hope there’s still some money left. She’s still showing at fine print shops everywhere. Beautiful girl. Peace advocate. Anyway. Donny Johnson.
TR: What’s the scoop?
PM: You saw “Art School Confidential”, right? Great movie. The question is, “What do you have to do to make the news as an artist?” Slash a prison guard? New York City is still the undisputed heavyweight of the contemporary art world. The City is still a magnet for the best and the brightest artists. When’s the last time you saw one of them on the front page of the Grey Lady?
TR: Where have you been? The Times runs color. They just laid off 250 people I heard. The right-wing pundits are rejoicing. The latest affront to them is that article about the administration sending Israel bunker busters on the double. Man, finally the Times is doing its job. Breaking the story on the NSA surveillance program, the Internet records story, & then the bank records story: I’m proud of them. At least they’re not playing doormat to the White House anymore. Still, I can’t believe the echo chamber ranting about hanging the editors of the Times for treason! It’s unconscionable, not that that ever stopped Rush, Hannity, Michael Reagan, that lunatic Ann Coulter or any of the other hater hacks wrapped in the flag. What’s your point?
PM: My point is, the same thing happened down in Austin while I was there: front page story for a guy falling on his head and waking up as an artist inspired by wildlife calendars, another for an ex-con making sculptures out of newspapers. No bad on the subjects. In fact, more power to ‘em. It’s not their fault that visual art is the red-headed stepchild of the press. Every paper runs pages and pages of movie, TV and music reviews. Want to know why? Just look at their advertising revenues. Of course, they’re going to give short shrift to those poor studio artists! So what, if what they do is at the top of the free speech food chain!
TR: I’m starting to see where you’re going with this, I think. I’ve been reading that book you left, Rosenberg’s The De-definition of Art. Some of the most interesting stuff in there deals with this notion of the value of art as a vehicle for the self-realization of the artist, whose realization is shared with society through the art & otherwise, & that this process is one of the last of its kind in modern civilization. The artist awake & aware is a force to be reckoned with, in other words. So he is mocked or shunned, in the name of profits or propriety by society’s media vehicles, which are corporate-conglomerate owned. Berkeley did a great study on this a few years back.
PM: Every once in a while, you remind me why I asked you to help me with this project. So, in Marfa, you have Judd and his guys. In Austin, who do you have? …I know it sounds like I’m picking on Austin. I’m not. Austin isn’t unusual in its constriction. American cities are under duress for a host of reasons. Austin is unusual in its refusal to die of oppression, when the forces pushing at it are so crushing. Again and again in Austin, you see individuals making tough choices and sacrifices to do the right thing, against all odds. The Cantanker crew are a perfect example, and Shady Tree, and Bolm – their Father’s Day show was heavy and good - St. Edward’s and a bunch more.
TR: You did that protest in Austin, complaining about the lack of coverage, didn’t you?
PM: I did.
TR: How’d that turn out?
PM: At the time, it was a horrible drag, although the protest itself, during the East Austin artist’s zoo, I mean, Studio Tour, was extremely good crack. I think it led to some good things and was worth the headaches. What it pointed to though, as evidenced by the notes I got from the papers’ editors, was the incredible defense mechanisms of the gatekeepers in the Austin press, who short shrift the visual arts relentlessly. Corporate media vehicles are brutal in their starving of local news, though the editors of those vehicles will shrilly bum rush any poor schmuck who dares question the press’s performance. Also, the cultural politics that the heartless Right bleats about often do dominate the newsroom, and for the very reasons the sheeple cite. The New Left’s agenda does permeate the discourse on the local level because the individuals driven by ambition and agenda to occupy positions of cultural power are good at the Machiavellian dynamics of that workplace and easily forced to conform to the strictures placed upon them. They also make great straw men, as Keller’s plight illustrates. In other words, Truth, Free Speech, Art: they’re caught in a pincer movement. The question is, “Who benefits when these bedrocks of democracy are cockblocked?”
TR: Whoa. I’ve been mulling over all this for a few weeks now. It’s grim. I’m starting to feel like it’s time to bust out the rusty razor blades. I was looking at those pictures from your trip through New Mexico & Texas, of the Americano Motel & Sterling City, & it was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Look at what these assholes have done to this country.
PM: I know what you mean. Believe me. But there’s hope Tommy, all over the place. Look at that kid, Joe Romero, who had the show at Pump Projects. He’s making balls-to-the-wall paintings & they’re priced to sell. I hope Sean and Josh find a hundred more just like him, because 100 times that many are out there willing to hang their work in the arena. Over on Kauai, I met a guy name Ambrose Curry III. He gave me hope. He paints surfboards & makes art with fiberglass & he’s been doing it for decades. His stuff is on one of those discs in the envelope. Auntie Aina gives me hope. “Localize ‘Em” is her motto. A Scanner Darkly, which is an Austin-based production, gave me hope, even though they didn’t hire me for that gig. Then there’s Vincenzo, who has an Austin show coming up. He’s the one driving the Cushman around Shady Tree during the Xmess thing. He told me about a guy who figured out how to fuel an automobile motor with water. The day before, I’d read about a new Ivy League school discovery of a new desalination process that’s 75% cheaper than anything else out there. Rauschenberg, Stella and Smith are all having major shows right now. Susan Joyce at Fringe Exhibitions gives me hope. My son gives me hope. Our prayers up on Mt. Baldy give me hope. Mission Street Yoga gives me hope. My friend John K. gives me hope. Ed Moses gives me hope. Did you see that new show of his over at Bergamont Station? And then there’s Marfa. Marfa and Donald Judd and all the rest down there. In the bulls eye of La Entrada, they give me hope. I could go on and on.
TR: I’m glad you have some, ‘cause I’m all bummed out now. I don’t know most of those guys anyway. Fuck it. I’m heading to Cafe Tropical for a Cafe con Leche and a bacon, egg & cheese croissant, with lots of hot sauce. Call me later. I’ll be under the bed, mewling with my retarded cat.
Part 3
The conceptual shift that I am describing with the two DNA images does not involve a geometric revisualization, as happened between Newton’s and Einstein’s views of space. In this case the geometric change between the two DNA images reflects the larger revolution of concepts now taking place and affecting both art and science, specifically, nonlinear sciences, which include fractal geometry, complexity, and chaos theory. These two images do not conflict in this new fractal era. They are a map for present developments in understanding more about the direct relationship between order and disorder. This creates a necessity for reorganizing our conventional knowledge, assumptions, and categories.
–Rhonda Roland Shearer, “Real or ideal? DNA iconography in a new fractal era.” Art Journal, 3/22/96
TR: Gary Indiana is such a frickin’ ass! He’s a complete idiot!
PM: Uh-oh. You’ve been reading ArtForum again.
TR: …& that ridiculous commie fop, Terry Eagleton! You know, Eagleton & Stalin would make great roommates in hell. You’d have to give Stalin a pistol that only works once in a while.
Dropped Call.
…
TR: Where you going to stay in Eureka?
PM: I’m going to stay with the Stropes, I think. I’ll pop over to see Bob Yarber at the Morris Graves Foundation probably, and check in on Virginia and her ballet company. It’ll be great to be in redwood country again.
TR: So, dude, Begash. I’m reading this quote from the envelope by Rhonda Shearer…
PM: Right. We’re going to start getting into the 4th Dimension now.
TR: Okay. Wait. Let me run back to my closet in the bedroom & grab my space suit. Don’t hang up.
PM: Tommy. Don’t be a dork. Did you read the first installment of “Transmissions from Marfa on Cantanker’s website, like I asked you? The point of that Art Journal quote is to explain why it’s necessary in the preface to establish a comparative discourse for Marfa and Austin. Also, did you get a chance to go check out the old Art For Humans blog? There’s a ton of stuff I gathered on 4D over a couple of years, while I was writing that completely unreadable book for the Journeyman Project. Did you Google “4th Dimension, like I asked you? It’s amazing! There’s been an absolute explosion of 4D theoretical exploration in the two years, since I quit doing the blog. I’m going to start it up again. Of course, most of what’s being promoted as 4D art is crap, superficial, nonsensical swill meant to add a little oomph to the marketing packages of dull artists.
TR: Hold on a minute, Big Man. How does this 4D thing relate to Judd?
PM: Great question!
If one wants to survive as an artist, one has to learn the skills of cultural analysis. My investigation of Austin’s art scene was moderately exhaustive, conducted over several years. Ultimately, the cons outpaced the pros. The following is a rundown of what I discovered about Austin while casing the city for an artist’s livelihood, on the ground and in production.
Artsies and artsy lovers generally were overwhelmingly encouraging, until I actually moved to Austin to live and work. In hindsight, it was like a cop con to get a fugitive out hiding with the old fake lottery ticket score angle. I’d gotten such wonderful first impressions from all the cultural administrator types I met with on my nearly monthly fact-finding visits in 2003 and 2004. Each one faded away almost as soon as I unloaded the truck.
For instance, I contacted Ballet Austin, to see if they were interested in exploring a multi-media, multi-disciplinary collaboration. I’d worked with dance companies before, and Austin’s premier outfit seemed the best prospect. I got a go-ahead signal and sent a proposal package and portfolio. Stephen Mills’ assistant suggested I attend a performance, so I flew in for one. I bought seats up front, and the show was lovely. During intermission the company’s CFO joined me and invited me backstage curtain dropped, where I met Stephen Mills and some of the dancers, while nibbling tasty treats. We talked a few more times, I found out a little about their situ, post-Austin dot com bust, and realized two things: Stephen Mills was an ambitious, extremely talented choreographer and director, and was going places; that the onus to finance any art that emerged from our talks would be on me. Whatever, nothing unusual about that – the next part, though is fuzzy in the details but clear in the outcome. Once I’d relocated to Austin, the nascent discussion dissolved.
This sort of thing happens, of course, all the time. Building working relationships among creatives, especially busy ones, is an extremely fragile enterprise under the best of circumstances. What’s the troubling thing in my Austin scenario? It happened every time. Now, you should know, dear reader, I’m not encouraging you to deduce anything yet, and I especially don’t want to give you the impression that Ballet Austin was in the wrong here. I don’t feel aggrieved by them in any way. Hell, they probably don’t even remember who I am. Anyway, it’s nothing personal; just business. Over the next couple of years, though, I gathered enough data to make some assumptions about Austin that a few thousand conversations and a couple of productions gelled into opinions.
Here are some. Austin (for the sake of the discourse I’m going to personify the city) commonly projects an image of itself as a wide-open good-times town with a frolicking hippie (recent) past. “Keep Austin Weird”, the obsequious bumper sticker states. Over coffee at Magnolia’s and Jo’s I heard numerous tales of joint-smoking days of guitars and free love and VW bugs and bliss at Barton Springs. After making the rounds of sit-downs and yuck-ups and art biz meetings and gallery visits, I grokked that a goodly portion of those folks who back in the day bounced happily from anti-war protests to UT ball games to all night hallucinogenic misadventures nowadays hold many of city’s key cultural positions in Austin’s arts infrastructure. Their perspectives on visual art are often brittle, hardened and closed. These are the ones who survived the failures of the era, got older, and committed to social activism from within the system. Towns that exhibit this particular dynamic in the niches of cultural power-brokering, often are identified as very “artsy” with strong “creative” communities. I did a series of residencies in Eureka, California, and the situation was comparable. Such towns almost never have an art market, as such, and “traditional artists”, say, people who make a living from selling paintings or sculptures in gallery shows, almost never can do this strictly through patronage from within their community.
The “Idea” has reigned in art for at least fifty and arguably a hundred years. Sometimes important ideas outlast the movements out of which they emerge. The legacy of influential critical theorists known as the “Sixty-eighters”, like Foucalt, Derrida, et al., is alive and well in Austin. For the Continentals, crushing the old capitalist hierarchies of “quality”, “value” and “meaning” was necessary to revolutionize culture. As one might imagine, in a community proud of its roots in the sixties and seventies, the “Everything is Art & Everyone’s an Artist” polemic, a la Warhol and Beuys, is firmly entrenched in the city’s cultural biosphere. The applied theories and polemics of Marxism, feminism, “cultural studies”, gender issues and the like are heavily embedded in the Austin cultural fabric. Unfortunately, these movements characteristically seeking to dismantle existing hierarchies and willingness to co-opt any communicative tool to that end has evolved into a sort of “New Colonialism”. Translation: Artist Beware; you are entering a censorship zone. As is common, in a community dominated by adversarial or oppositional thinking, if one doesn’t kowtow to the ruling regimens of discourse when navigating in culture circles, one will be set upon as if one lay down upon a nest of fire ants. Or tripped into a rink full of roller girls.
Tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks, and darkly circled eyes are prevalent among the young acolytes of this sept. If this is one horn of the pincer squeezing the artist, the other is the buttoned-down, tightly coiffed and gym-muscled aggroids’, fervently conservative and Christian, ditto-headed and reactionary. These represent the rest of Texas in Austin, who know where the city got its name, and rankle at the idea that liberals congratulate themselves on maintaining Austin as an oasis in the desert that is the unenlightened rest of the state. These camps seem to only commune around kegs, and only if the average age of the communicants is less than thirty years, or if the band is the uniter and not the divider kind. The illegal aliens will have built the stage for such a party, cooked the food, and cleaned up after everybody’s gone home.
I scoped out ArtHouse and AMOA, and liked the shows (Andy Warhol and Terry Allen are shows I recall); went to the openings, wrote and dropped off letters, pressed flesh, did glib-talk with a couple of the young, cool hungry ones dues-paying there. The ArtHouse annual “New American Talent” is usually good, thanks in large part to the guest curators. Jerry Saltz, one of my faves, gave an art talk there one afternoon that possibly saved my life. That’s about all I ever got out of a bunch of submissions, notes and attempts to parley with ArtHousers and AMOA’s respective staffs. I made inquiries at the Creative Research Laboratory, attended an opening or two, met the director, e-mailed back and forth, and popped in for openings. CRE turned out to be a dead end, after the director I’d been talking to quit, because she was overworked and underpaid (bad sign). I checked out Flatbed press, and Guadalupe Art Center (burned down), and F8, and David Berman’s gallery (they like to watch your development for a few years before taking you seriously enough to have a conversation – it helps, though, if you’re UT-affiliated). Everyone in the little Austin art market seemed to have an angle that was established as such. I talked to city government officials about matters such as culture incubation matching funds, and such. I passed around info packets to all the main culturati, info-dealers, commentators, pundits, gallerists and institutional artsies. Boy, was that an exercise in smiling while tossing shekels down a deep shit hole! More on this later. I frequented the coffee shops and met a few artists and such. My friend Jack Spencer shows at Stephen L. Clark gallery, so I introduced myself there. Of course, I stumbled up and down South Congress with everyone on First Thursdays. That was particularly depressing. This is Austin’s biggest ongoing art happening, and it’s much more a kegger block party and hippie craft fair than anything resembling give-a-damn about art. Dougherty Art Center turned out to be a good place to get a low-paying teaching gig. Mexic-Arte presented some good exhibits, and the mission of the museum matters, but as a McLean born in West Virginia, I didn’t see much of a future with them. I looked for art and found it hanging in the usual other-dedicated places, on consignment mostly (a bad sign), places like hair salons, restaurants and bars. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve shown my share of young artist paintings in such cruddy enviros, cruddy in the sense that art has little hope of doing anything meaningful there, other than supplying free decor for the owner and an artsy ambiance for the typically busy-with-something-else-besides-looking-at-art-at-the moment clientele. It’s just that the prevalence of “alternative” wall space in a city in the absence of an art market usually spells doom for the budding artist’s going concern. I attended an absolutely atrocious couple of performances at the Blue Theater. I tried, at a friend’s urging, to develop something with a high-profile boutique hotel owner, but soon realized she was more interested in appropriating concepts than ironing out a deal. In the hopes of connecting with multi-disciplinary-minded musos, I stomped along with the madding crowds of Sixth Street, SoCo, Lamar clubs and bars, some of the bigger venues, the multitudinous mini-stages in eateries and drinkeries; though I have to admit I really only made a small dent after thirty or fifty performance venues, not counting backyards and living rooms, in the Live Music Capital of the World. Music, however, is not visual art, and visual art is generally defined as something more than nightly entertainment, and it’s not often one can find a friend who’s inclined to compare the merits of Odd Nerdrum and Joel-Peter Witkin in an eardrum-busting music bar. I did discover that most local musicians get paid diddly and are treated generally as well as the day laborers who gather on street corners across the city every day. That managerial mentality predicated on the notion of an always-available immigrant workforce for-hire pervades the art scene in Austin, just like it pervades in most all of Texas. I didn’t have much luck approaching impressively-monikered (but itinerant) AMODA, or Austin Museum of Digital Art, and I didn’t try too hard after I discerned that this outfit was mostly an academic hobby for UT artsy-dayjobbers. There’s a lot of that UT boosterism in Austin, as it turns out. The University of Texas culturati are pervasive throughout Austin’s art scene hierarchies, though it’s doesn’t to be a function of any rigorous meritocracy. Many of the city’s “important artists” are either employed by the school or recently graduated from it. These don’t seem to mix well with others, which seems convenient. It’s easier for an artist to appear generally relevant when his art is presented in a context that is mutually-congratulatory by design. This is a trick one learns in the halls of academia. One night, to illustrate, ArtHouse had a big opening (for its annual) and The Creative Research Lab had a big opening. I attended both, and did not see more than a handful of people who crossed over whatever line separates UT from everything else artistically vital in Austin. The work at ArtHouse never failed to outshine the work at CRL or the Blanton, or any other UT exhibition space. Beautifully edgy-cool architectural enhancements aside, all the neon, vinyl and spiff identity work on the face of a building does not ensure, as Austin demonstrates, that one will find art inside the building that is at least commensurate in quality. Further, if the typical commercial artist/creative type believes his product (designed to sell cars, food, Texas, clothes, whatever) is Art, and said commercial artist is competitively natured, he will undermine however he’s able the status of the fine artist, for obvious reasons. I could continue to outline the details on the backdrop for visual art in Austin, but I think now I should interject a little screed that points to the real rattler under the bed. I wrote this right around the time I buckled down to do my first Austin exhibit, so maybe it’ll help the reader who’s craving a little more gonzo in the narrative find an even livelier sense of displacement:
Twangtown
The absolute most godawful thing happened when I moved to Twangtown, Tejas. All, or at least some, of the fevered Brisket dreams - brought on by almost a full year of drop-ins and expensive recon forays into the sweaty, river bent burg in the cleavage of the continental divide between North & South Americas - dissolved into a foot-weary, bug-bit near fatal personal cataclysm that revealed the ugly underbelly of the Republic of T’s vaunted big-tooth/hair blonde Bethann and big bicep/10 gallon Bobby Ray hey’yall friendliness. No Yeehah welcomes for this Road dusty traveler. Just artsy bluster and nobody-bigwigs pretending there’s an art market here, a cultural haven, a reason other than window-dressing that even one decent gallery exists here (showing – what else – cowboy art).
It’s a bizarre thing to scope the 2004 Presidential Campaigns through a Twangtown lens, embedded in Halliburton Holler. We all can agree that our Prez Bush, Elf 2, is the Golden Boy product of a few generations of selective breeding. His handlers and he were formulated from Yankee DNA in vats of crude ole, grabbed at taxpayer-hired gunpoint 70-80 years ago. Like some ice-crazed orphan of a mad whitecoat experiment gone awry, our all-American, misunderestimated hero has stumbled into the role of point-man for the greediest, least scrupled band of shadow robber barons this country has seen since the War Between the States spawned the first generation of genocidal megalomaniacs, those Fausts whose gore spattered names adorn University t-shirts stretched taut over the nubile teenage breasts of our best and brightest Girls Gone Wild on Springbreak 05. Speaking of wilding, Twangtown’s where the new Robber Barons bring their oil-royalty partners from the sandy kingdoms across the great pond to whore and get fucked up & get a taste of world class nobody-or-somebody-who-gives-a-shit bleary, authentic alt.country. Anyhoo. The Roves and Swift Boat Vets for Sale and the Bakers and the DeLays, all the horned and hoof-footed players in 04 PC cycle through Twangtown on their way to Houston, Dallas-FW, San Antonio, Indonesia, Kuwait, China, Columbia, Russia, London, etc. This is where the first palms get greased. It’s a deal-maker’s town, a country club town, a town of who you know and what you got. No bones about it. It’s a cultural thing here to define the boundary of your pack’s territory by skinning a patsy, as publicly as possible. The definitive moment, the signifier for the bully-king meanness, a signifier for the local proclivity for lynching, you may recall, branded Dallas, the year before I was born. That’s the steak side of town and the taco side of town, both. I’ll get to UT (see above and below), and its tight-lipped “academic” stench-of-beer stranglehold on Twangtown, later, balanced by an ode to the finest Brisket God ever made. First, an aside. In and around Twangtown, people drive trucks up your ass so hard, you think you’re eating your mattress in one of the State’s privatized hellhole Pens, where they fry or dose to death black, brown and white murderous bastards daily. It’s only when you’ve had this happen 40 or 50 times (the tailgate horror, I mean) that you begin to notice a pattern. The fierce road warrior you thought was reaming you is a scrawny or blob-bellied yuppy pussy or a bob-haired fish-on-the SUV’s backdoor skeleton-faced soccer mom, most of the time. The other times it’s a heat-hardened and sun-blasted middle-class contractor on his way to his night job, cursing the Ken Lays and praying for his three kids’ college education. On the other side of the tracks, or MOPAC, it’s a steak and taco town, decorated with the dreams of nice dreamers and lovers, who cover, cower, entertain, satisfy, suffer and service the Reapers of the Republic. It’s a flea-centipede-spider-tick-scorpion-fly-mosquito-cockroach-wasp-infested sticker bush of a place, with more gorgeous girls per capita than anyplace I’ve seen outside of Manhattan or Israel. Then again, I haven’t been to Paris or Scandinavia, so what the fuck do I know. Never enough, I suppose. One thing I do know. I’m a Texan, now. & Texas, aside from being the proudest, most powerful Republic on Earth, is the best, most juicy place an artist could hope to find himself in, on the spinning orb today. For the next five years at least, she’s going to be the home of Art for Humans, The Journeyman Project, The 4D Media Program, 01, and DDDD, and yours truly. Sorry, Big Apple. No matter how much I love you (and you know I do), if you can’t make it in Twangtown, you can’t make it anywhere.
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Okay, I think it’s time for an Extended Aside. So maybe it sounds like I’m going overboard with the Texas being the best place on Earth for an artist exhortation. That would be true, if I were talking up Austin, or even Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. I’d fairly be vulnerable to accusations of brandishment, as a ridiculous hyperbolist, if we combined all those cities’ art scenes in the breadth of my acclaim. As it turns out, I wasn’t extolling the virtues of Austin’s artistic environment (or all the others, though each Texan city has its bright spots and the collective is noteworthy). In fact, as you may ascertain from my overview of Austin’s scene, I consider that city to be a very difficult place for an artist to succeed as an artist. I haven’t even broached the others as a topic of inquiry. Nope, I was rhapsodizing Marfa. I just didn’t know it at the time.
Confused? Well, don’t be discouraged. This business of Toucan Sam (“I follow my nose; it always knows…”) culture sleuthing can be discombobulating, and “the introduction” is as good a place as any to attempt to clarify potential points of fuzziness, such as my Gaussian ways of figuring out what the hell I’m thinking, or maybe more importantly, how I’m thinking. Let’s start by defining my approach towards arts reportage as “Asymmetrical.” As in: at first you thought I was writing about Donald Judd and Marfa. Then, I was writing about Austin. Now, we’re back to Marfa. See what I mean? Let’s break it down.
I’m not attempting any sort of strict linear chronology here. An obvious example is the above Twangtown screed. I penned that gem long before I ever drifted down Highway 67 to Marfa. Call it intuition, revisionist history, whatever. I like to call writing like this anecdotal. Editors like to call it feverish, incomprehensible, obtuse, and cetera. What you’re reading certainly isn’t journalism. What I’m sharing is my cultural analysis, a study of creative production pipelines and my impressions as an artist, arising from that distinctive and singular point of view. It’s one of the reasons why I’m going to such great lengths to preface and introduce this story about Donald Judd, Marfa, Austin, and the big pile of other information included in this story. If you didn’t notice, dear reader, this is what they call in the word business a “full disclosure”, a disclaimer that’s alerting you to the fact that I might have a vested interest in the matter of record. Truth be told, I do.
What’s my angle? My motivations for writing this “Transmissions from Marfa” are not the same as the typical travel feature writer’s. Marfa’s been covered by quite a few of these, as you’ll discover if you do a Google search, like I did. I’m not focused on the oddities of Marfa, the queer lights that dance around it, the movies past or present filmed there, or the chow or flop houses. These are all worthy topics for a travel writer, and most of them spend oodles of word count delving into such concerns. I have deeper fish to fry (sorry for the goofy food thing again – see “Why Texas Is on my Mind, Part One). I’m an artist groping for the Muse, so to speak. I’m downloading, surveying, processing, inventorying, and perusing the scene for Art and art-making purposes. The information I gather I hope to put to use in my own practice. I am only objective insofar as one must be in order to ascertain a real picture of the subject. That “real picture” part is what I try to share with the general reader. However, I’m composing “Transmissions from Marfa” in the proud tradition of artist-writers/critics like, that’s right, Donald Judd.
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